FrightFest bills itself as “the UK’s No.1 horror & fantasy film festival”, running under the tagline “The Dark Heart of Cinema”. It was “conceived by Paul McEvoy, Ian Rattray and Alan Jones and staged its first event in 2000 at the Prince Charles Cinema, off London’s Leicester Square”; their long-serving PR man Greg Day “joined the company as a co-director in 2006”. In its own words, “the objective of FrightFest was to provide the UK with a horror fantasy festival similar to the market leaders in Europe, Sitges (Spain) and Brussels (Belgium)”, and it has “since evolved into a community where audiences and guests alike travel from all over the world to be part of the event’s unique atmosphere”.
The main festival takes over Leicester Square across the August bank holiday weekend, with a Halloween all-dayer in late October and a Glasgow edition each February as part of the Glasgow Film Festival. The 2026 London edition — the 27th, sponsored by Tubi — runs 27 to 31 August at the ODEON Luxe Leicester Square and ODEON Luxe West End, and promises “a record-breaking eighty-two features across five screens”: a main programme alongside three Discovery screens offering “a global menu of genre delights”, plus the festival’s regular First Blood, Documentary and Retrospective strands. Twenty-four of the features are world premieres, drawn from sixteen countries across four continents.
